2015-05-18 22:14 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > I know I'll regret this... > You should not
> > Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: > > > Sometime in a future, two letters will not be enough even in ISO > > 3166-1, if countries continue to split/merge (this does not happen > > frequently but is occurs every few years; and it will not be possible > > to reuse old codes that are maintained for a long period). > > ISO 3166-1 already defines alpha-3 and numeric code elements, as well as > alpha-2. > But how to work with the 2 letters limitation when the world wants more stability in codes (this was an important reason why ISO 639 was not fully integrated in IETF tags, and why the IETF tags have chosen the stability by keeping also the codes that hbave been deleted in ISO 639, but only deprecated in IETF language tags (BCP47). We've already seen the famous reuse before 50 years (do you remember when CS was reassigned just a few months after it was discarded after an initial introduction for some months in Serbia-Montenegro?) ISO coding standard are known to be unstable. This would also be true of the UCS if Unicode did not push its stability pact with ISO! But now let's remembers that parts of ISO 3166 are also included (not fully) in BCP47 tags that require the stability. IT will prohibit reassignments by ISO (or if this happens, this will break BCP47 and et IETF will reject the change and will use another subtag if needed. So country codes cannot be reassigned (and we can expect many more merges/splits or changes of regimes in the many troubled areas of the world.
